As students’ progress through Mathematics each year, they are slowly introduced to some letters from the Greek alphabet. The most common one is pi (and pronounced “pie” as in “yum, I’ll have some of that apple pie”, with students introduced to this irrational number (a number that cannot be written as a fraction) in Year 8 when they calculate the circumference and area of a circle. “It’s a Greek letter???” I hear you ask. Well, yes it is, and we tend to use many other Greek letters in Mathematics.

Recently, I had one of my Year 7 students ask me how many decimal places I could recall to and I am sorry (not sorry) to say, I can do it to two decimal places. Memorising numbers is not a hobby of mine, but the world record currently stands at recalling pi to 70030 digits, and here it is………3.14…….. (unfortunately I can only get that far) but if you are interested in beating Suresh Kumar Sharma’s world record of 70030 digits, then there are quite a few YouTube videos out there to get you started.

What makes this such a difficult task is that there are also no patterns with pi, so remembering it to 70030 is quite remarkable. There’s also a record for recalling any sequence of numbers within pi – mind is blown!

There are many other Greek letters we use in Mathematics. There’s theta which is used to represent an angle, mu is the symbol for mean and sigma is the symbol for standard deviation. We also use delta which means change.

However, the one I find most interesting as we see and use it everyday is phi, which is known as the golden ratio. We see the golden ratio used in a variety of fields including Arts, Architecture, Geometry and even in nature. Without boring you too much with the Maths behind it, the golden ratio is also an irrational and is approximately 1.618 and is the solution to the quadratic equation

Although Mathematics is beautiful in itself, here are some examples of the golden ratio used in both art and in nature.

Ahhhh… the wonder and beauty of Mathematics.

Karen McMullen
Learning Leader: Mathematics